The Perception of Formant Tuning in Soprano Voices

Vos, Rebecca R.; Murphy, Damian; Howard, David M.; Daffern, Helena

doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2017.03.017

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Importantly, while enhancement of the singer's formant is typically associated with male voices, related spectral modulations can occur in females [64][65][66], consistent with sexual non-dimorphism [6]. It would therefore be prudent to study female and mixed-sex chorusing to test whether male listeners have preferences for corresponding modulations in female voices before proposing specific selection mechanisms.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sex-related communicative functions of voice spectral energy in human chorusing

Keller,

Lee,

König

et al. 2023

Biol. Lett.

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Music is a human communicative art whose evolutionary origins may lie in capacities that support cooperation and/or competition. A mixed account favouring simultaneous cooperation and competition draws on analogous interactive displays produced by collectively signalling non-human animals (e.g. crickets and frogs). In these displays, rhythmically coordinated calls serve as a beacon whereby groups of males ‘cooperatively’ attract potential female mates, while the likelihood of each male competitively attracting an actual mate depends on the precedence of his signal. Human behaviour consistent with the mixed account was previously observed in a renowned boys choir, where the basses—the oldest boys with the deepest voices—boosted their acoustic prominence by increasing energy in a high-frequency band of the vocal spectrum when girls were in an otherwise male audience. The current study tested female and male sensitivity and preferences for this subtle vocal modulation in online listening tasks. Results indicate that while female and male listeners are similarly sensitive to enhanced high-spectral energy elicited by the presence of girls in the audience, only female listeners exhibit a reliable preference for it. Findings suggest that human chorusing is a flexible form of social communicative behaviour that allows simultaneous group cohesion and sexually motivated competition.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sex-related communicative functions of voice spectral energy in human chorusing

Keller,

Lee,

König

et al. 2023

Biol. Lett.

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“…Amplification in the range of ca. 500-1000 Hz would match especially the fundamental frequencies of soprano voices and could support their strategy of formant tuning, i.e., an amplification of the fundamental frequency by vocal tract resonances [33].…”

Section: Mask Modulation With Head Phantommentioning

confidence: 96%

Acoustic analysis of professional singing masks

et al. 2022

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Wearing face coverings became one essential tool in order to prohibit virus transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic. In comparison to speaking and breathing, singing emits a much higher amount of aerosol particles. Therefore, there are situations in which singers can perform or rehearse only if they are using protective masks. However, such masks have a more or less adverse effect not only on the singer’s comfort and tightness of the mask but also on the radiated sound. For this reason, the spectral filtering and directivity of masks designed specifically for professional singing was measured. The tests were performed with a head phantom. Over most of the spectrum, attenuation is observed, although amplification happens at some low frequency bands for different mask types and directions. Especially singing masks with a plastic face shield showed partial amplification of up to +10 dB below a frequency of 2 kHz, while only slight significant attenuation and no amplification (minimal acoustic loss) were seen for woven fabric masks. Above 2.5 kHz, the transparent masks showed the greatest sound attenuation up to −30 dB, while woven fabric masks produced an overall lower sound attenuation of up to −5 dB. In addition at low frequencies, the sound was amplified or attenuated equally in all directions for masks with a stiff plastic face shield. At higher frequencies, the attenuation is higher to the frontal than to the backward direction.

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“…The neuronal responsivity matches statistical patterns of natural stimuli (e.g., topographic mapping, frequency tuning) (Amin et al, 2013;Zhao et al, 2019), therefore deviations of synthetic voices away from naturalistic statistical models of speech may in part explain the perception of naturalness reduction. Formant frequencies contribute to speech naturalness perception and are particularly useful cues for vowel discrimination, sound subjective preferences and gender attribution (Vos et al, 2018;Zhao et al, 2019;Hardy et al, 2020). Formants, speech rate, and median pitch act together as acoustic cues that help gender naturalistic discrimination in voice.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuronal and behavioral affective perceptions of human and naturalness-reduced emotional prosodies

Duville

Alonso-Valerdi

Ibarra-Zárate

2022

Front. Comput. Neurosci.

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Artificial voices are nowadays embedded into our daily lives with latest neural voices approaching human voice consistency (naturalness). Nevertheless, behavioral, and neuronal correlates of the perception of less naturalistic emotional prosodies are still misunderstood. In this study, we explored the acoustic tendencies that define naturalness from human to synthesized voices. Then, we created naturalness-reduced emotional utterances by acoustic editions of human voices. Finally, we used Event-Related Potentials (ERP) to assess the time dynamics of emotional integration when listening to both human and synthesized voices in a healthy adult sample. Additionally, listeners rated their perceptions for valence, arousal, discrete emotions, naturalness, and intelligibility. Synthesized voices were characterized by less lexical stress (i.e., reduced difference between stressed and unstressed syllables within words) as regards duration and median pitch modulations. Besides, spectral content was attenuated toward lower F2 and F3 frequencies and lower intensities for harmonics 1 and 4. Both psychometric and neuronal correlates were sensitive to naturalness reduction. (1) Naturalness and intelligibility ratings dropped with emotional utterances synthetization, (2) Discrete emotion recognition was impaired as naturalness declined, consistent with P200 and Late Positive Potentials (LPP) being less sensitive to emotional differentiation at lower naturalness, and (3) Relative P200 and LPP amplitudes between prosodies were modulated by synthetization. Nevertheless, (4) Valence and arousal perceptions were preserved at lower naturalness, (5) Valence (arousal) ratings correlated negatively (positively) with Higuchi’s fractal dimension extracted on neuronal data under all naturalness perturbations, (6) Inter-Trial Phase Coherence (ITPC) and standard deviation measurements revealed high inter-individual heterogeneity for emotion perception that is still preserved as naturalness reduces. Notably, partial between-participant synchrony (low ITPC), along with high amplitude dispersion on ERPs at both early and late stages emphasized miscellaneous emotional responses among subjects. In this study, we highlighted for the first time both behavioral and neuronal basis of emotional perception under acoustic naturalness alterations. Partial dependencies between ecological relevance and emotion understanding outlined the modulation but not the annihilation of emotional integration by synthetization.

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The Perception of Formant Tuning in Soprano Voices

Cited by 10 publications

References 27 publications

Sex-related communicative functions of voice spectral energy in human chorusing

Sex-related communicative functions of voice spectral energy in human chorusing

Acoustic analysis of professional singing masks

Neuronal and behavioral affective perceptions of human and naturalness-reduced emotional prosodies

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